Crooked Bridgeport bank key witness Alicia Mandujano is sentenced in Washington Federal Bank for Savings case

As federal regulators tried to untangle the financial mess at a crooked Bridgeport bank eight years ago, the bank’s top loan officer revealed she had been helping the bank’s CEO falsify loan records to hide millions of dollars that were looted from the bank.

The following day, Alicia Mandujano was fired as the senior loan officer for Washington Federal Bank for Savings, a tiny, family-operated bank with ties to the Daley family and its 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization.

Mandujano — one of 16 people who had been indicted on criminal charges following the bank’s collapse in December 2017 — was sentenced Monday to two years supervised release, including 12 months of home detention. She is the fifth former bank employee ordered to help repay $27,899,991 to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which is trying to recover $83 million it spent to cover the bank’s losses.

A few days after Mandujano was fired in November 2017, John Gembara — the bank’s chief executive officer, chairman, president and chief stockholder — was found dead with a rope around his neck inside the main bedroom of a bank customer’s Park Ridge home.

Gembara had been fooling federal regulators for years, operating a “massive” embezzlement scheme that cost the bank as much as $140 million, federal authorities revealed when they shut down the bank on Dec. 15, 2017.

Mandujano briefly apologized to Chief U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall, who presided over two criminal trials in which Mandujano testified for the prosecution.

“Real people lost money,” Kendall told Mandujano. “Real people who were saving for retirements or a vacation are still working because they lost money.

“You gave the government a road map on how to investigate the case,” the judge said. “There is no one else who came in and cooperated before the bank’s collapse.”

Mandujano was the last defendant in the long-running Bridgeport bank scandal to be sentenced. That followed her testimony at three trials to help convict four men:

• Robert M. Kowalski, Gembara’s close friend, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence for embezzling more than $8 million.
• Marek Matczuk, a contractor who owned the home where Gembara was found dead. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison for looting about $6 million from the bank. He died in prison a few months ago.
• Miroslaw Krejza, another contractor, is appealing his six-year prison sentence for embezzling more than $2.6 million from the bank.
• Former Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson, a grandson of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley and nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, who got a four-month prison sentence for lying to regulators about the money he owed the bank and cheating on his income taxes. He was forced to resign his seat on the Chicago City Council representing Bridgeport.

Founded by Polish immigrants more than a century ago, the bank was run by Gembara family members for three generations. Gembara’s late father Emil Gembara hired Mandujano as a teller shortly after she graduated from high school. She eventually became his secretary, a job she kept when John Gembara took over from his father.

She testified that people she called “Friends of John” got special treatment. They weren’t required to make any payments on their loans while getting additional cash advances as the bank paid their real estate taxes on those properties with overdue loans.

Mandujano, 54, of Oak Lawn, “guided law enforcement and prosecutors through the labyrinth of falsified and fabricated documentation that yielded millions in distributions and benefits to the handful of persons,” according to a court filing by her lawyers Kimberly Tarver and Victor Henderson.

“The only `benefit’ she received for following her boss’ instructions to facilitate the scheme was the ability to keep her job and earn a moderate salary to help support her family,” they wrote.

Mandujano’s sentence will allow her to continue operating a laundromat and store originally purchased by her disabled husband. Ten percent of her gross income will go to repay the FDIC.